Ask HN: H1/L1 folks, how are you coping with the hostile visa environment?

There are many perspectives to deal with this situation or any other situation in life. Here are a few. Simple/Practical take – Answer why staying or leaving matters? Leaving a country after living for a decade can causes many headaches; financial hardships (outstanding loans), logistic hardships (Selling assets such as car or house) or disrupts your children’s or spouse’s education or it significantly changes the work profile you get outside your current role and social hardships (lower your status among your relatives because you are back in your home country). There can be many such reasons but I think these can be broadly classified into two buckets – type-1 – reasons of habit – we get habituated to a certain lifestyle and friends that changes with the move and type-2 – it causes certain unavoidable hardships. Bucket the reasons. Try to proactively mitigate the ones that may cause hardships and worry little about type-1 reasons – we form new habits and get a new lifestyle. Historical take – If you read some good history books you will realize that political and social turbulence in human life is a norm rather than an exception. Everyone who lives through an elongated period of peaceful time takes stability for granted. You can consider this as realism or pessimism but the reality is that things change and we have to accept it. In Czeslaw Miloszs’ words – “Let us admit that man is no more than an instrument in an orchestra directed by the muse of History. It is only in this context that the notes he produces have any significance. Otherwise even his most brilliant solos become simply a highbrow's of diversions.” It is not a stretch to always remember the provisional nature of the world. Comparative take – I am not a big fan of comparing one life with another to lower the gravity of one’s situation, but I am putting it here if it may help. People go through hardships and come out better at the other end of it. Read Dostoevsky’s biography. He was put through a fake execution and sent to exile and he is still remembered decades after his death. Victor Frankel lived through a holocaust. Put things in perspective – is moving between countries that bad? Philosophical take – In Victor Frankel’s (Man’s search for meaning) words – “They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” In Albert Camus’ opinion (The Myth of Sisyphus) – Know that life is absurd, remember that absurd cannot be reconciled, living with the absurd is a matter of facing the fundamental contradiction and maintaining an awareness of it, trying to escape it is struggling against it. Read Mahabharata or The difficult of being good. This epic is very good in reminding us that human life is vulnerable. Anxiety, despair, courage, envy etc. are a part of life. Upholding a balance to be happy is one’s own responsibility. My choice – I like Camus’/Eastern philosophical take on dealing with hardships. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses on it. Consciousness is what defines our world and controlling it is the answer. All this can be condensed into one simple answer – read books and broaden the perspective of life.

I got a job in another country.